Ensemble Mercury Pool No Water Austin Texas Review

Pool (no water) is a solid ensemble effort: review

This revival of Fringe 2015 hit can seem nightmarish with its journeying into jealousy, selfishness and command.

puddle (no water)

Written by Mark Ravenhill. Directed by Jill Harper. Until Oct. xv at The Citadel, 304 Parliament St. Cue6.ca

The Toronto Fringe of 2015 is having a pocket-size renaissance on Toronto stages this fall.

Last calendar week, Britta Johnson's moving new musical Life Afterward opened to rave reviews in a polished professional person production. A few blocks due north, another Fringe 2015 hit, pool (no water), is in its own remount. Information technology however has its low-budget indie border but makes an argument for making fourth dimension for Fringe plays in the regular theatre season.

The 2000 play is a lesser known piece of work by "in-yer-face" British playwright Mark Ravenhill, the writer who helped bring that fashion to forefront of London'south theatre scene in the 1980s and '90s.

The genre is typified by graphic onstage violence, explicit sexuality, foul language, cynical themes and other such affronts to polite British society (for a pretty articulate case, Ravenhill's first major hitting was 1996'southward Shopping and F--male monarch).

Pool (no water) is far more palatable, almost tame, even, past today's standards, post-obit a grouping of five artist friends who reconnect with a 6th much more than successful pal, who had get estranged amidst her new fame.

An blow at this erstwhile friend'south deluxe dwelling house — complete with chef, gym trainer and pool boy — leaves her wounded in the hospital and the five friends with an opportunity for a new fine art project that challenges their self-perceptions every bit honest, moral people.

In true Ravenhill fashion, when the group feeds into their baser selves, giving in to their shallow, material desires leads directly to Bacchanalian excess and self-destruction but, perhaps enlightened past his ain success in theatre, he gives his characters a modicum of redemption and peace in the end.

The mystery of pool (no h2o), as director Jill Harper lays out in her program notes, is that the script is written without characters or directions: it'southward a kind of verse form and information technology's up to each production to make up one's mind how many actors to use, how to divide the lines, and what moments to emphasize and how.

Equally in the Fringe production, Harper teams up with choreographer Patricia Allison to buttress the script with movements that illustrate the inner monologues of the bandage — Allison Price, Chy Ryan Espana, Daniel Roberts, Eva Barrie and Nickeshia Garrick — as they collectively tell the story.

The five actors motion together, collaborating like a Greek chorus (Greek tragedy is recalled again in repeating motifs of flying and crashing in this Icarus-similar tale). The overall upshot of the choreography and ensemble cast; the minimal gear up (a few chairs, a gurney and several long manus-held lights) by Christine Groom; sound by Tim Lindsay and lighting by Simon Rossiter is somewhat nightmarish, equally if these friends are in limbo, doomed to dwell in their moral mistakes for eternity.

Withal in that location are times in which the audience may wonder if they're being too harsh on themselves.

The fine art project they embark upon later their friend's blow involves documentation, vulnerability and imperfection — written before the invention of ubiquitous social media platforms, these ideas may have been more radical in 2000. In today's age of cocky-circulate, it seems less transgressive.

Of grade, issues of consent are intrinsically linked to the characters' feelings of guilt. In a mod reading of pool (no water), the fact that an creative person's consent to participating in a project leads direct its destruction, and the lack of consent to its creation, is where the existent evil lies.

Harper'due south production might take benefited from wading into that murky conversation.

Nevertheless, pool (no water) is a solid ensemble effort, a brusque and not-so-sugariness journeying into the emotional underworld of jealousy, selfishness and control that we've all probable, and sadly, made in our lives.

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Source: https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/stage/2017/10/06/pool-no-water-is-a-solid-ensemble-effort-review.html